Do not quote me on this, but I am pretty sure that the Bronx’s Paulding Avenue is the first New York street to have a cinematic trilogy named after it. Credit filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris, the native New Yorker whose Vintage: Families of Value, That’s My Face and latest work Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela explore his personal and family history during journeys to four continents–experiences centered in the Bronx household where he grew up in the ’70s alongside a thriving community of pan-African revolutionaries. Comprising Super 8 and video footage as well as photographs culled from generations’ worth of archives, the films this week screen together for the first time at BAM.

Tshepo Clement Madibeng portrays South African exile (and the filmmaker’s stepfather) B. Pule Leinaeng in Thomas Allen Harris’s latest film, Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela (Photo: Chimpanzee Productions)
The trilogy is anchored mostly in the documentary format, with the conspicuous experimental dashes of Vintage (about a trio of black families with gay siblings, including Harris and his brother Lyle) and That’s My Face (Harris’s endlessly fascinating quest to reconcile spirituality and black cultural identity) finally giving way to the exquisite dramatic sequences interlacing Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela. The latter film examines Harris’s relationship with his stepfather Benjamin Pule Leinaeng, who fled the South African village of Bloemfontein with 11 colleagues in 1960 to generate momentum for the fledgling anti-apartheid movement. Exile brought Leinaeng to New York, where he met and eventually married Harris’s mother (and perhaps his favorite interview subject) Rudean. In keeping with the personal narratives of his earlier films, Harris takes the occasion of Leinaeng’s death to examine his ambivalence about their tumultuous relationship.
But it is the carefully cultivated fusion of flashbacks and interviews featuring the surviving “disciples” that signals the director’s most accomplished creative triumph to date. “With each of my films, I kind of see them as an art project that are designed to activate a community in the course of the making of the film,” Harris told The Reeler. “What I really wanted to with this film Twelve Disciples was not just make it a historical documentary, but I also really wanted to activate a young community in Bloemfontein that had no idea who these guys were. So I basically got these non-actors and I brought them in touch with these older guys, and we set on this journey together. I think that’s part of why they come across; these young people who are in the film, you ask them when the struggle began in South Africa, and they say 1976.* And here these guys were neighbors with some of the older disciples. So I think it was a real transformational period for them as well.”
The archival footage and pictures threading Harris’s previous films reappear in Twelve Disciples, provoking viewers of the trilogy to reimagine the moments and what they reveal about the people and places in the frame. As such, the grainy cutaways represent a sort of interactive discovery process. The third time viewing a photograph of Rudean Leinaeng and her sons or the the third glimpse at a Paulding Avenue birthday party is not messy overlap; rather, it is Harris’s entreaty to join him in reconsidering what he knows.
“Twelve Disciples didn’t really start until (Leinaeng’s) funeral,” Harris said. “And at that point, I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ I saw him for the first time as an adult. But at that time, the other two films were kind of done, and I feel like I grew so much in the making of Twelve Disciples that it allowed me to see the footage in a whole different way. Everything is seen differently; it’s used differently. I’m a different filmmaker each time I aproach that material.”
As such, screening the trilogy together is more than a smart move on BAM’s part–it is sort of essential That’s My Face had screened there previously in 2001, after Harris premiered the film to accolades at the Sundance, Tribeca, Berlin and Toronto film festivals. Twelve Disciples has made the festival rounds itself since last fall, and Harris, who is now based upstate, will drop in tonight for a Q&A following the 6:50 screening.
Meanwhile, the experience of narrative filmmaking in Twelve Disciples has Harris developing a handful of new scripts. But he is not ruling out a Paulding Avenue Quartet. “Everywhere I’ve been showing the film, they keep telling me I need to make a film about my mom,” he told me. “I think the other films would be different if I continued making films about my family, which I intend to do–maybe as something between the narrative projects. I just feel like when you’re working with narative you’re thinking about the marketplace so much. You can’t avoid it. But these other films, they’re so pure, you know? I like to take as long as I need to take to finish them, and they aren’t corrupted. They’re documents–testaments and memoirs in a way, but more visual, poetic memoirs.”
* In Soweto in 1976, a series of protests and riots against the apartheid regime of South Africa left hundreds dead and galvanized the anti-apartheid movement around the world.

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